DIRECTOR: Jean Jacques Martinod & Matthew Wolkow

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:

On one end, a fig tree magically grows deep in Montreal's wintery asphalt as it reaches, on the other end, the thorny roots of a poisonous datura flower in the high Chihuahuan deserts, casting its spell on a fallen meteorite. In between these spectral worlds, tied by plants, nourishing one another, comes a liminal space in which muscovy ducks, peacocks, pigeons, and owls (real and fake) encounter, acquaint, and thus conjure a future within a language, translating into haptic vision, musicalities, ultimately a hauntological mythopoetic. 

PROGRAM SCHEDULE:

LINES TO COLOR WITHIN by Matthew Wolkow

EXT. DAY. MONTREAL. / On the outskirts of the metropolitan highway, a Mediterranean fig tree stands. / Said Ficus carica, this tree is the work of a 60-year-old Montrealer of Argentine origin. / The miracle of a backyard where three regions of the world meet. / The story of an observation.

SANDOVAL'S BULLET by Jean-Jacques Martinod

A near-death experience can be a Rorschach test for how much weight we place on coincidence. Two such incidents would make anyone consider the existence of fate. Jean-Jacques Martinod’s camera finds quiet contemplation in a tropical rainforest in Ecuador, while we hear death-defying Isidro Varga (and his brother) recollect the times when a bullet and a broken bottle nearly ended his life. The tone of Martinod's film hovers between carefree nonchalance and pensive caution: as if to say that chance and destiny are unexpected neighbours.

PEACOCK'S MONOLOGUES by Matthew Wolkow

Halfway between poetry, ornithology and improvised music, this film is an appointment, a meeting of sorts that begins 6000 km apart between Lisbon and Montreal, and foremost a conversation between two neighbors. The very result of a trip to Portugal for one and faraway reminiscences for the other.

DATURA'S AUBADE by Jean-Jacques Martinod and Bretta C. Walker

A farmer discovers a fallen meteorite in the high Chihuahuan deserts. The Alien Earth and the Earth Alien commingle under the spell of a deadly nightshade.

Artist Bios:

Matthew Wolkow

Driven by a curiosity for knowledge, Matthew Wolkow creates a cinema revealing the persons he meets and the stories that come along. Situated between essay and experimentation, rubbing the real, the imaginary, speech, words, music and sensorialities, his work benefits from this hybridity where form is approached as a resolution. In October 2021, the Cinémathèque québécoise screened his first retrospective.

Jean-Jacques Martinod

Ecuadorian filmmaker, media artist, radio DJ, educator, and film curator, Jean-Jacques Martinod’s practice operates as constant relational inquiry within the realms of cinematic noumenal perception. His works study the intertwined relations between the human and the non-human, living mythologies, disappearing memories, biomes and techne as manifested in relation to living worlds, and how perception mediates the relations within these ecosystems and their cohabitant entities.